Some of the tough questions being asked in these articles and elsewhere include: do teachers really believe that ALL poor minority children can succeed, or just a few? (Do their parents?) Do you think it can happen today, now -- or, a la Richard Rothstein, will it take more money, better teachers, and all the rest?

J-Schools Like Ed Schools? (Media Coverage)

“Journalism education suffers from the same mindset as teacher education -- that somehow it's enough to be able to deliver your message effectively, without any corresponding requirement to know what you're talking about."

On Capitol Hill, one of the law's Democratic sponsors reiterates his support for NCLB compared to weak state standards here: Big George Speaks (Eduwonk). At the same time, Nebraska Cong. Lee Terry (R-NE) introduces what the NEA calls "the first Republican-initiated bill to amend the No Child Left Behind Act." (H.R. 1177)

Meanwhile, there are lots of different views on this week's CEP report:

"Killing an alien wouldn't fall under the bill," said Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia (D-Aurora), the sponsor.

Would that apply to all aliens or only those who "just look like humans?" Molaro then asked.

"If it's an alien that looks like a human, which is an alien, yes," Chapa LaVia responded.

Later, she refined her interpretation this way: "If it was an alien that pretended to be a human, I guess then it's human. Then it would fall under this bill because it's human against human. ... How would we know he was an alien?"

Getting the best teachers where they’re needed most (Teaching and Leading)

The willy-nilly distribution of our most effective classroom teachers -- who almost inevitably end up part of disproportionately expensive All-Star faculties at a small set of successful schools -- is perhaps the most ignored issue in state, federal, and local school improvement efforts today:

Certainly, the people pushing high school and small school reform aren’t talking about it. It’s largely off the screen of most standards and accountability advocates. Researchers and ideologues get lost figuring out how to measure good teaching ("Certified" Teachers Aren't Always the Most Qualified CER). Merit pay, weighted-student budgeting, and value-added assessment evangelists are still nibbling at the margins in most places, for political, logistical, and other reasons. As Education Week highlighted earlier this year in its “Taking Root” package, there may be no part of NCLB that has received less attention and effort than the “equitable distribution” requirement.

Oh sure, lots of effort has gone into getting more teachers qualified, largely because of NCLB. And better recruitment has been the focus of some big-city systems for the past few years. Mentoring and induction programs for new hires are also increasingly common, though the quality is still questionable. And a few people have focused on researching high teacher turnover rates and growing more teachers from within the communities that need the most help.

But focused attention on getting the best teachers where they’re needed most is still surprisingly hard to come by. The past few weeks of clips have included a brave band of district leaders who are trying desperate and controversial things like transfer limits to make sure that their lowest schools don’t have their least able teachers. This week’s Center on Education Policy report on year three of NCLB mentions a few district-led efforts, including one incentive program in Florida that pays certain teachers extra to work in low-performing schools.

The most amazing example of this hesitancy and inaction surrounds nationally certified teachers, who in theory should be ready and willing to help the cause. They're supposed to be the best of the best. Most already get financial recognition for their abilities -- one of the only forms of salary differentiation that we have (outside of credentials and experience).

However, as this week’s EW article (Conferees Mull Best Uses of NBPTS Teachers) shows, even when we think we know who the best teachers are, and are willing to pay them extra for their skills, we’re not sure we want to put them in the inferno of a low-performing school. (Teach and Learn’s take on the same conference can be read here.) Just a few states and districts have created incentives for nationally certified teachers to teach in high-need schools.

As I write in today’s column in the Chicago Journal, it seems to me that, with NBCT incentive programs and more generally, the needs of the school system must finally be brought into the current teacher hiring process, which is currently dominated by teachers’ and principal’s interests. There are a bunch of ways to get there, and no one’s suggesting that teachers and principals shouldn’t have a big say in who teaches where, but Struggling schools deserve good teachers, too (Chicago Journal). It's time.

Tribune's Stolen Lunch, Award-O-Rama (Media Coverage)

What is a reporter to do if her editor walks up and hands her an article and says, essentially, "write something just like this."? Well, she writes it, of course (I guess, never having been a real reporter). And never mentions the publication that broke the story.

There's some additional reporting about Palo Alto High to serve as a fig leaf in the CSM piece, but nary a mention of the Tribune. Is that right?

Now, this site you're reading now is largely made up of links that were initially gathered through the efforts of others (including other blogs, emails, and the good folks at Google News). So it's not like riffing off of others' work is always bad. But the original creators of the content are always credited, and something that only one person has found (or found first, if I can tell or remember) is usually credited with a "via so-and-so" -- the exception being Jimmy Kilpatrick's EducationNews.org whose abundant finds I have yet to figure out how to credit without embarrassing myself.

Or maybe I've got it all wrong -- feel free to instruct me.

Award-O-Rama

It's not quite the same as an Education Writers Association award, but here are the education-related 2005 National Magazine Awards (and finalists). Kudos to all and sorry about the lack of links they didn't provide:

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Philip W. Semas, editor-in-chief, for Degrees of Suspicion: Inside the Multimillion-Dollar World of Diploma Mills, by Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, June 25 (excellence in reporting).

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Philip W. Semas, editor-in-chief, for its special report on plagiarism by Thomas Bartlett, Scott Smallwood, David Glenn and Scott McLemee, December 17 (excellence in reporting).

The Atlantic Monthly: Cullen Murphy, managing editor, for How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement, by Caitlin Flanagan, March (essays).

National Geographic: William L. Allen, editor-in-chief, for Was Darwin Wrong?, by David Quammen, November (essays).

3/23/2005

Real Estate, iPods, & High Fives (School Life)

After a week's worth of seriousness, articles about the lighter side of education are are a good reminder that it's not all about illiterate kids and dysfunctional bureaucracies:

We've all hear or read about how important school report card information is to people buying and selling their homes, but has anyone else noticed the Century 21 Real Estate ad that's been running on network TV these days in which a pregnant woman trying to find out if the neighborhood schools are any good before she buys a home interrogates a busful of children on their way to school about class sizes, school budgets, and the like. They all look at her blankly - they're little kids, after all -- and the bus roars off.

It is delicious that the ad brings mainstream attention to parents' ongoing desire for more information about their children's schools. It's wonderful that the ad sends its message with some humor. And it's interesting -- though perhaps not significant -- that she doesn't ask them whether the teachers are nice, or let them play all day. She asks about nuts and bolts.

Almost as good: A review of a new TV show called Life on a Stick (Hollywood Reporter ) includes the following line: "Put another way, the "No Child Left Behind" folks might have made an exception for Fred."

So far, it's only colleges that seem to be having to deal with full-on wireless Internet access in class: Wireless in the classroom (via Instapundit). But it won't be long before it's an issue in K12 classrooms (as infrared gaming and text messaging already are).

Florida, Teachers vs. Testing, Parents' Rights, and More (NCLB News)

Florida Follows Suit

What passes for big NCLB news this week is that FLA, long trapped for obvious political reasons into following NCLB closely, may now finally do what many other states are doing -- change things around so that its AYP calculations and results aren't so stringent:

In terms of new reports and studies, this week’s biggest news is the release of a report from the Public Education Fund based on hearings from around the country that is notably open-minded on whether NCLB is working or ot. In Hearings, Poll, PEN Finds Support for Goals of NCLB (EW), Open to the Public (PEN). Ove all, the report seems to find that parents among others strongly support the goals of the law, but are unsure of what the law requires (including its parent involvement provisions) and feel left out of the school improvement process.

A same-day rebuttal from the Achievement Alliance states: “We strongly agree with PEN’s conclusion that federal and state governments must better enforce parents’ rights under NCLB. But ...the PEN report perpetuates the misconception that NCLB punishes students...No Child Left Behind represents the best chance this nation has of ensuring that all children learn to high standards..."

Between Pencil Purchases and Privatization (The Business of Education)

There's lots going on in between the mundane purchases of pencils and high-altitude arguments about privatizating public education -- but it seems like most of us don't track it, are sorta scared of it, and maybe don't get it.

A cursory look around suggests that the business of education includes services and partnerships that go far beyond the familiar territory of testing and textbook companies, Edison knockoffs, NCLB tutoring (see above), and the many variations on private involvement going on in Philadelphia (see below).

3/17/2005

Going Private In Philadelphia (Urban Education)

Salon.com's take on the Microsoft-funded "School of the Future" points out that the effort has nothing to do with the Gates Foundation and chronicles a range of similar privatization-related efforts going on under schools CEO Paul Vallas: Building a better high school.

Some of the plans sound pretty scary, and the piece is predictibly skeptical about private involvement in public education, but it acknowledges realistically that public-private partnerships are here to stay. In fact, the next stop for Microsoft's School of the Future may be Chicago.

For more on the increase in private companies servicing public education, see the "Business of Education" (a new section).

In the meantime, there was also some sketchy announcement about how Philadelphia was going to use federal Smaller Learning Communities funds to .... buy PLATO software. Can someone explain?

More on CJR, Embarassed in Minneapolis, and Daring to Enter the Blogosphere (Media Coverage)

Lots of comments about the CJR article on education news from last week. There are about 10 comments from education writers around the country -- and a rebuttal of sorts from the CJR author herself -- all located here. If you want to know how real education writers think about how to report on education, this is a great place to look. Eduwonk takes the CJR piece to task for wildly over-emphasizing the privatization angle in NCLB: CJR comes out against NCLB. Over on the Alternative Reform Network listserve, Substance's George Schmidt uses the CJR article as a jumping off point to castigate the Chicago Tribune's coverage of education news, which Schmidt views as even worse than the Houston Chronicle's during the 1990s. Another series of comments on the Atlanta Journal Constitution site can be found here.

What Passes for Education Journalism...

This week's award for the most daffy piece of education journalism goes to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose piece -- Kids who need help don't get it under No Child Left Behind law -- is so misleading, inaccurate, and addle-brained that I might hate it even if it was praising NCLB. (I promise to take on a pro-NCLB article soon.)

In essence, the piece argues that NCLB isn't doing its job because there are so many low-performing kids out there who aren't being "helped" under the law. And, true enough, NCLB rates and sanctions districts and schools, not individual kids, and so there are lots of kids whose needs aren't identified and targeted under the law.

It sounds horrifying to me, but I guess there's an argument to be made that NCLB should focus on kids, not schools. But no one --not even the reporter -- makes that argument or even explains how that would work. Even worse, the piece goes on to blame the fact that many schools in Minnesota aren't caught up in NCLB's net on the law, rather than the state, which, like many others, found a bunch of ways to keep schools making AYP. Last and least, the pro forma quote from the state superintendent tacked on at the end as a fig leaf to journalistic balance doesn't make sense.

Where was the editor on this piece, and who wrote the headline? Is this a real paper? Yikes. Any scholarships left for the next EWA conference? I know some folks who need to attend.

The Education Blogs -- Do You Dare to Go There?

Last but not least, there are as usual some interesting thoughts and links floating in the education blogosphere -- if you dare go there. For example, JoanneJacobs.com traces the twisted story of whether there are enough female columnists out there: Mad Women. OQE lists some of the most ridiculous terms used in education circles (though I forgot to see if "scaffolding" is in there: Edubabble: a glossary (via The Instructivist). The Spectator's blog says to parents "don't buy that toy:" A plague of toys The American Spectator (via Number 2 Pencil). The Education Wonks have gathered this and that from nearly everywhere, it seems: Carnival of Education, Week 6.

Parental anxieties remain high despite the "slacker mom" movement, and so it makes sense that stressed parents who aren't lucky enough to get on the TV show SuperNanny go out and hire a coach: With Mayhem at Home, They Call a Parent Coach (NYT).

3/15/2005

Reporters and Civilians Talk Back About Education News (Media Coverage)

Comments continue to pour in on my crititique of the Columbia Journalism Review article on the state of education reporting in America. (See "Recent Posts.")

There are about 10 comments from education writers around the country -- and a rebuttal of sorts from the CJR author herself -- all located here. If you want to know how real education writers think about how to report on education, this is a great place to look.

Eduwonk takes the CJR piece to task for wildly over-emphasizing the privatization angle in NCLB.

Over on the Alternative Reform Network listserve, Substance's George Schmidt uses the CJR article as a jumping off point to castigate the Chicago Tribune's coverage of education news, which Schmidt views as even worse than the Houston Chronicle's during the 1990s.

Another series of comments on the Atlanta Journal Constitution site can be found here.